We left home May 31st and returned June 16th. On this driving trip we stopped in Quebec City (B), Sainte-Anne-des-Monts (C), Gaspé (D), Percé (E), Carleton-sur-Mer (F), Rivière-du-Loup (G) and then home.

As we prepared for travel once again, our little village of Thornhill — located just north of Toronto in that space between city and country — is well on the path of opening up after the long period of lockdown due to the global pandemic. Subway parking lots are fuller, there’s more traffic on the streets, fewer masks are worn; optimism abounds. My passage from quarantine has been slow, inhibited by the reluctance to take that final step into the open air, out from our protective cocoon woven around us by the threads of fear and social responsibility. But now it’s time to dare to travel. A journey not just of roads, but of an emotional transformation from the secure into the uncertain.

Our car, acting both as my shell and my tool of restoration, will enable navigation along a gradual path towards metamorphosis. Packed with the necessities and some frivolities for good measure, it is all set for the long journey from home to the Gaspé Peninsula through Québec City and along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River.

The route, ordered by an immoveable ribbon of asphalt and concrete, is disrupted by the twists and turns that comes with an emotional transformation. This drive is an embodiment of in-betweenness, uncertainty, a state of transience and the temporary, a bridge connecting the lockdown and the world that’s evolving beyond it.

Yet, it is this risk that comes with travel, this flux, this ambiguity, that stirs a profound excitement. It is the essence of transformation that it provokes a tension, a thrilling dance between predictability and uncertainty – a debate that drives the wheels of life.

Québec City was our first tentative step outside our protective layer of home and routine; a gentle dip into the shallow end, the depth mitigated as we have been there many times before. The timeless charm of its old world architecture, the city, also emerging from the pandemic, stands as a testament to endurance, to the will of people to adapt and persist. It is an embodiment of a new normal, a place solidly rooted in the stability of a past, injected with a hope in what might come in an uncertain future.

The drive continued along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, a legacy of the last ice age, contained within its boundaries, flowing unceasingly, yet Its waters are ever changing, never the same ones as before. The constancy of its existence, juxtaposed against its eternal flux, echoes the dichotomy of this journey. The physical act of doing and the emotional confidence to act.

As our destination is finally reached, emergence from our car marks the end of a transition, but I realize that it’s another beginning.

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